The conservative Republicans in France have a new leader: 57-year-old Eric Ciotti is expected to pull the party out of the crisis after its disappointing performance in the presidential election. Some of his critics consider him right-wing extremist.
A good ten years ago, the French right still provided the president, today the Les Républicains party is fighting for its survival. The new party leader Eric Ciotti now wants to give the Republicans momentum again. He prevailed in the runoff against Senator Bruno Retailleau with 53.7 percent of the vote. The approximately 91,000 party members thus had a choice between two very similar profiles of the strongly conservative wing of the party. The previous leader of ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy's party, Christian Jacob, resigned at the end of June.
The 57-year-old Ciotti is one of the political veterans of his party, which, unlike two other Republican presidential candidates, he has never left. In the election campaign for the party presidency, he focused on the classic themes of the far right: immigration, security and differentiation from President Emmanuel Macron's liberal camp.
Ciotti also tried to convince the party members with a double act: With him at the top of the party, they would also get Laurent Wauquiez, head of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, as a future presidential candidate. "You are the natural hope of the right (...), I will help you so that this experience becomes concrete," Ciotti said at a joint appearance.
Ciotti had thus reaffirmed his role as "eternal second", in which his critics see him trapped. The son of an Italian immigrant had joined the predecessor party of the Republicans at the age of 16, which was then still called the RPR and was a popular party. He began his political career in the shadow of Christian Estrosi, the current mayor of Nice. He served him as a parliamentary assistant, office manager, election campaign manager. Estrosi also helped him get elected head of the Alpes-Mairitimes department in 2008. Over the years, the political mentor turned into a bitter rival. The two politicians have not spoken to each other for years. While Estrosi politically approached the Macron camp, Ciotti sought proximity to the right-wing populist Rassemblement National.
He tried in vain to run for the Republicans as a presidential candidate against Macron. But in the internal runoff, he was defeated by the regional head of Ile-de-France, Valérie Pécresse, who received less than five percent of the vote.
Some of the voters went over to the right-wing populists, who had to be brought back, was how Ciotti justified his closeness to Marine Le Pen's party. When asked in April 2021 what made him different from the Rassemblement National, he replied: "Our ability to govern ".
"Ciotti no longer flirts with right-wing extremism, he's right in the middle of it," the left-wing newspaper Liberation quoted an unnamed former party member as Ciotti. In fact, the right-wing extremist presidential candidate Eric Zemmour demonstratively refrained from running his own candidate against Ciotti in the general elections in June.
In his long tenure as an MP, Ciotti once managed to get a law passed with his name on it. It provided for cuts in welfare for parents of truants and was abolished after three years.
Among other things, Ciotti advocates writing France's Christian roots into the constitution. He also thinks it makes sense to return to military service, although the investigative paper "Canard Enchaîné" found out that Ciotti himself had relied on the help of politician friends to avoid having to join the army.
In the current legislative period, Ciotti made headlines when he called for a tie to be made compulsory in the Assemblée Nationale. The call was immediately followed by almost all female MPs of the left-wing alliance Nupes.
